Thoughts on Torah, working, living in Israel and how they go together.

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Traveling in America

I was recently traveling in the US (which is why I haven't posted in a while), and would like to relate some of my experiences.

I was in Palo Alto for Shabbos and had a very interesting Shabbos. There is an outreach kollel (http://www.jsn.info/) in Palo Alto as well as 1 Orthodox shul. It is very interesting to see the mix of people in the shul, you have the black hat kollel guys side by side with the students from Stanford, the single guys with long hair etc. It is amazing how well everyone gets along. In Israel many of us live in basically homogeneous communities and this is the complete opposite where you have a very heterogeneous community.

I am always surprised when I visit Northern California how few religious Jews live there. There are so many Jews in hi tech, you would think that more religious Jews would move to Silicon Valley to work there. For some reason it hasn't happened and there is only a very small Jewish community.

I was also in Kansas City. I was amazed to find out that in Kansas City there is a Glatt Kosher Subway. Kansas City has a relatively small Jewish community and therefore I am very surprised that they can support a restaurant like that.

The religion of America is sports. It is amazing how much sports there is on TV. In fact, it is the only thing that there is to watch. In my hotel I had ESPN, ESPN 2, ESPN News, and ESPN Classic.